The worsening conditions of the environment around us signal us to self-reflect and reconsider our daily activities that contribute to the deterioration of the world. However, small yet impactful lifestyle changes are crucial in such times, and you can get a good start by incorporating fun activities like eco-friendly gardening in your daily life.
By adopting sustainable and environmentally friendly gardening techniques, you could take a massive step towards ensuring a safer and greener future. In this article, we discuss why eco-friendly gardening is necessary and give you four simple tips for building and maintaining an eco-friendly garden.
Why Do You Need Eco-Friendly Gardening?
Traditional gardening is now mainly influenced by chemical-based products such as fertilizers and pesticides. These can significantly harm the environment and wildlife and even disturb our food chains.
Eco-friendly gardening, on the other hand, does not use harsh chemicals and pesticides to produce quick results. Instead, it emphasizes using organic matter, composting, and mulching to ensure better soil health and overall benefit for the environment.
It also encourages biodiversity. In traditional farming, the use of harmful chemicals and pesticides often harms pollinators like bees and butterflies. Eliminating the use of such chemicals can preserve various types of wildlife and ensure a healthier and more diverse ecosystem.
Moreover, conventional gardening typically encourages excessive water and energy usage. Sustainable gardening practices like composting and water conservation save these resources and reduce a garden’s carbon footprint.
4 Tips for Maintaining an Eco-Friendly Garden
Here are 4 tips you need to start an eco-friendly garden in your home!
Get Locally Sourced Mulch
Mulch is best known for retaining soil moisture, suppressing weeds, and helping keep slugs at bay. Biodegradable mulch, such as compost and leaf mold, can also enrich the soil content with organic matter once they are broken down. For the best results, you should get your hands on good-quality local mulch. Run a quick “mulch for sale near me” search and find what you want.
Investing in locally sourced mulch is one of the best ways to reduce your garden’s carbon footprint. Local mulch requires less transportation, less fueling, and less consumption of resources than imported mulch. Moreover, it is better suited for your locality’s gardening needs.
Compost Your Kitchen and Garden Waste
Composting is a natural process in which microorganisms break down organic waste into nutrients that enrich and nourish soil. You can make eco-friendly compost at home with kitchen scraps and garden waste, such as grass cuttings and dry leaves.
Recycling kitchen and garden waste is a simple and free way to get your compost. It is excellent for turning seemingly useless vegetable peelings, kitchen scraps, and grass cuttings into a wildlife-friendly, nutrient-rich natural fertilizer for your soil.
Organic, homemade compost promotes healthy plant growth and is an eco-friendly alternative to chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This also means that you are less likely to buy compost from a retailer, which can reduce your carbon footprint and overall commercial consumption.
Choose Plant Species Carefully
One of the simplest ways to encourage biodiversity and water conservation in your garden is by choosing native plants. Local plant species are typically suited to the local climate and soil conditions. Unlike non-native plant species, they do not require excessive watering or pest control. This reduces the need for irrigation and conserves water.
Consider including a wide range of native plants in your garden, as they attract pollinators and beneficial insects that promote biodiversity. Different varieties of creeper plants are great examples of eco-friendly plant types. Not only are they beautiful to look at, but they are also easy to maintain with minimal soil and water requirements.
Use DIY Planters Made from Recycled Objects
Instead of buying new and expensive planters, consider recycling and reusing old objects and containers as planters. This is an excellent way to manage waste and prevent usable items from ending up in trash piles. It would be your contribution to reducing overconsumption and the heaps of trash that are piling up on our planet.
Moreover, a DIY planter is an excellent way of adding a personal touch to your outdoor space. You can get as creative as you want and explore different types of planters you can create with objects like crates, old mugs, steel tubs, and buckets.
Conclusion
Global warming and climate change have significantly impacted our environment. We are experiencing its effects through unreasonable rains and sweltering hot weather. As gardeners, it is our responsibility to adopt a sustainable gardening approach that is healthy for our plants and supportive for the environment. These five tips can help you achieve this and meet your sustainable gardening goals.
